Colla Parte experiment with Cues

pmc.galoubet · July 18, 2026, 10:03pm

I had read the Colla voce / colla parte / "col." lines topic. I wus the musci of the singer.anted to do something somewhat in that line. Actually this a small document, only 2 Players in it are concerned: a soprano singer and a melodic instrument. I wanted to have some sections of the melodic instruments to have no music of its own, but use the music of the singer.

In the original partition that I arranged, the instrument was a violin, but in my case it is transposing instrument, which I thought might be a problem. And I also expect that having the source be a player with lyrics and the target be pure instrumental could also prsent a challenge. And I was aware that using the Cues model to implement a Colla Parte was a cheat, since Cues were not designed for that purpose, In my case, I did not care about parts but wanted to work in the Full Score.
But actually it went very well, I had to use a lot of the Cues properties, and the result is quite satisfactory. Her is the image of the result:
Tornami a Vagheggiar-Y.pdf (123.0 KB)
The only problem occurs at measures 16, and 53-55. Obviously The Cues mechanism decided to flip the stem direction of some notes, which is absolutely acceptable), but the slurs on them were not flipped. Since my slur direction rule was kept as follow stem direction, and the source notes followed that rule, I expected to see the slurs flipped along with the stems.
This looks like a glitch, not a dramatic one, but if it is, actually in a normal use of Cues, it would be very difficult to catch: Nothing would appear in the Full Score, In the parts, it would be easy enough to fix the problem by flipping the slurs by hand, and the resulting flipping in Full Score would never be seen. Probably nobody would ever report anything. That is one of the risks of trying a new cheat !
If my analysis is correct, fixing the problem might not be complex, perhaps in the code section that decides to flip the Cue sources note stems it is only needed to add the flipping of the slurs.

Yet perhaps there is another explanation, and/or some way to fix it in my case.

Thanks for looking into it

k_b · July 18, 2026, 10:42pm

Patrick,
thank you for posting the example pdf file.
It looks, as if you have made yourself much more work, than would be necessary..
First, the slurs being on the wrong side of the cue line: if you could post the project file itself (Tornami a Vagheggiar-Y.dorico) we could have a look, what is happening.
Anyway, is there a reason you did not use the “duplicate to staff below” or “move to staff below” function for the colla parte bars?
It would handle the transposing issue automatically, without any additional work.

pmc.galoubet · July 18, 2026, 11:06pm

Tornami a Vagheggiar-Y.dorico (1.8 MB)
Thank you for your interest. Here is the project.
Actually it did not gave me that much work once I was familiar with the Cues properties.
I wanted to try it this way, without any extra staff. And I am not sure that extra staves would do what I want: with a Cue I know that any change I make in the Soprano part is immediately visible in the instrument part.